The Great Miss Driver Part 15

"Serves you right, in my opinion," said I.

"I suppose so," he answered, "and I bear no malice. I'm glad Aspenick didn't force me to wring his neck. But I shall be very lonely--n.o.body comes here--well, not many are invited! Will you drop in on the exile and smoke a pipe now and then after dinner?"

"Oh, yes, I'll look you up." My tone was impatient, I know: his burlesque was neither intelligible nor grateful to me.

"After dinner, if that suits you. I'm going to take advantage of my solitude to work in the daytime. The door will be barred till nine o'clock."

I nodded--and looked at my watch.

"Yes," said Jenny, "we must be going. Everything's settled, Austin, and--and Mr. Octon has been very kind."

"I'm glad to hear that anyhow," I said grumpily. If he had been kind, why had I heard that wail?

In fact I was thoroughly puzzled--and therefore both vexed and uneasy.

He accepted his banishment--and yet was friendly. That result seemed a great victory for Jenny--yet she did not look victorious. It was Octon who wore the air of exultation and self-satisfaction; yet he had been thrown to the wolves, abandoned to the pack of Fillingfords and Aspenicks. Well, that could not be the whole truth of it, though what more there might be I could not guess.

He came with us down the gravel path which led from the hall door to the road, where the brougham was waiting. Jenny pointed across the road--where Ivydene stood with its strip of garden.

"That's the house I meant, you know," she said, evidently referring to something that had pa.s.sed in their private conversation.

He stood smiling at her, with his hands in his pockets. He really was, for him, ridiculously amiable, though his amiability, like everything else about him, was rough, almost boisterous.

"If you must go on with your beastly Inst.i.tute," he said, "and must have a beastly house for a beastly office, to make your beastly plans and do your other beastly work in, why, I daresay that beastly house will do as well as any other beastly house for your beastly purpose. Only do choose beastly clerks, or whatever they're going to be, who haven't got any beastly children to play beastly games and make a beastly noise in the garden."

Quite the first I had heard of this idea! Quite the first time, too, that Leonard Octon had been so agreeable--he meant to be agreeable, though the humor was like a schoolboy's--about the Inst.i.tute!

"I think I'll speak to Mr. Bindlecombe about it," said Jenny, as she gave him her hand. Her farewell was more than gracious; it was grateful, it was even appealing. Nor for all my anger and vexation could I deny the real feeling in his eyes as he looked at her; he was admiring; he was affectionate; nay more, he seemed to be giving her his thanks.

She was very silent all the way home, answering only by a "yes" or a "no" the few remarks I ventured to make. On her own account she made only one--as the result of a long reverie. "It'll all blow over some day," she said.

If it was her only observation, at least it was a characteristic one.

Jenny had a great belief in things "blowing over"--a belief that inspired and explained much of her diplomacy. What seemed sometimes in retrospect to have been far-sighted scheming or elaborate cunning had been in reality no more than waiting for a thing to "blow over"--holding the balance, maintaining an artificial equilibrium by a number of clever manipulations, until things should right themselves and gain, or regain, a proper and natural basis. The best opinion I could form of her present proceedings was that they rested on some such idea. For the moment she banned Octon under the pressure of her other neighbors; but in time the memory of his offenses would grow dimmer--and in time also her own position and power would be more firmly established. Then he could come back. She might have persuaded him into good humor by such a plea as that. If it were so, I thought that she had misled him and perhaps deceived herself. People have long memories for social offenses.

And--one could not help asking the question--what of Fillingford? Where was he to fit in, what part was he to play? Was a millennium to come when he was to lie down on Jenny's hearthrug side by side with Octon?

There was a lady too many at dinner--a man short! Jenny could have avoided this blot on her arrangements by eliminating Chat--and poor Chat was quite accustomed to being eliminated. But she chose not to adopt this course. I rather think that she liked to feel herself a bit of a martyr in the matter, but possibly she was also minded to make a little demonstration of her submission, to let them guess that Octon had been coming and that she had acted on their orders with merciless prompt.i.tude. In other respects the party was one of her most successful.

Great as was the strain which she had been through in the afternoon, she herself was gay and sparkling. And how they petted her! Lady Aspenick might naturally have looked to be the heroine of the occasion--nor had she any reason to complain of a lack of interest in her story (I had to complain of a great deal too much interest in mine)--but it was for Jenny that the highest honors were reserved; the most joy was over the one sinner that repented.

Fillingford, of course, took her in to dinner. It was not in the man to pay what are called "marked attentions" before the eyes of others, but his manner to her was characterized by a p.r.o.nounced friendliness and deference; he seemed to be trying to atone for the coercion which he had been compelled to exert earlier in the day. He did not fall into the mistake of treating her acquiescence as a trifle or the case as merely that of "cutting a cad," to use Aspenick's curtly contemptuous phrase.

He raised her action to the rank of an obligation conferred on her neighbors and especially on himself. He was man of the world enough to convey this impression without departing too far from the habitual reserve of his demeanor.

Lady Aspenick looked at the pair through her eyegla.s.ses; we had at last exhausted the incident of the morning--though we had not settled the precise degree of accidentality which attached to the collision between her whip and Octon's face; under a veiled cross-examination she had become rather vague about it--that may weigh a little in Octon's favor.

"It's a long while since I've seen Lord Fillingford so lively," she remarked. "He seems to get on so well with Miss Driver. As a rule, you know, we women despair of him."

"Has he such a bad character among you as that?"

"He seemed to have given himself up to being old long before he need.

He's only forty-three, I think." She laughed. "There, in my heart I believe I'm matchmaking, like a true woman!"

"Yes, I believe you are. Well, these speculations are always interesting."

"We're beginning to make them in the neighborhood, I can tell you, Mr.

Austin."

"And--knowing the neighborhood--I can believe you, Lady Aspenick."

"You've no special information?" she asked, laughing. "It would make me so important!"

"Oh, you're important enough already--after this morning. And I know nothing--absolutely nothing."

"You mean to say Miss Driver doesn't tell you----?"

"Actually she does not--and I'm not sure I should know if she did."

"Of course I'm only chaffing. But it would be rather--ideal."

"H'm. Forty-three may not be senile, but would you call it ideal? For a romance?"

"Who's talking of romances? I'm on the question of marriage, Mr.

Austin."

"But if one can afford a romance? What's the use of being rich?"

"No, no, it's the poor people who can go in for romance. They've nothing to lose! Divide nothing a year between two--or, presently, four--and still it's no less."

"But the rich have nothing to gain--except romance."

"Oh, yes, sometimes. At the time of the Coronation I had quite a quarrel with Jack because he wasn't a peer. He said I ought to have thought of it before, but I said that that would have been quite disloyal." She lowered her voice to a discreet whisper. "I do hope she's not distressed about this morning?"

"A little, I'm afraid. Octon had his interesting side for her."

"I'm so sorry! I must be very nice to her after dinner."

Lady Aspenick was very "nice" to Jenny after dinner, and so were all of them. She seemed to take new rank that evening--to undergo a kind of informal but very real adoption into the inner circle of families which made the local society. She was no longer a stranger entertaining them; she had become one of themselves. This could not all be reward for ostracizing Octon. Lady Aspenick's conversation, in itself not remarkable for depth or originality, was a surface sign of another current of opinion bearing strongly on Jenny's position. But no doubt acquiescence in the ostracism was a condition precedent both to the adoption and to that remoter prospect which inspired it.

Jenny's eyes were very clear. After they had all gone, I returned to the drawing-room to bid her good night. Chat had already scuttled off to bed--dinner parties kept her up later than was to her liking. Jenny was leaning her elbow on the mantelpiece.

"Well," she said, "I've been good--and I've had my sugar-plums."

"Yes, and they've got plenty more for you if you go on being good."

"Oh, yes." Her voice sounded tired, and her face looked strained.

"Even some very big ones!"

Up to now she had shown no sign of resenting the pressure put upon her; she had been sorrowful, but had displayed no anger. She did not even now challenge the justice of Fillingford's decision; but she broke out into a rage against the control claimed over herself.

"They force me to things," she said in a low voice, but in a tone full of feeling. "They tell me I must do this or do that, or else I can't be one of them, I can't rank with them, I can't, I suppose, marry Lord Fillingford! Well, I yield where I must, but sometimes I get my own way all the same. Let them look out for that! Yes, I get my own way in the end, Austin."